In 2022, a major uniform and linen distributor partnered with DispatchTrack to solve what had become a major headache that was limiting their ability to service their clients flexibly and efficiently: torturously slow territory planning.
In many ways, it seemed like an intractable problem: the effects of any change in how they organized their territories could be complex and hard to predict, and the sheer complexity of ensuring a high level of service for their customers in addition to a fair revenue split among their field teams meant that generating new territory plans often took 6 to 10 weeks. But by leveraging our delivery territory management capabilities, they were able to shorten that time to just 2 days.
It’s hard to convey how transformational that can be for a field services operation—but we’re at least going to try. In this post, we’ll go over the ins and outs of delivery territory management, how DispatchTrack’s platform jolts the process into unprecedented speeds, and that translates into ROI for services companies.
Let’s dive in!
Delivery Territory Management: Optimize Early and Often
DispatchTrack territory optimization capabilities are based on a few important ideas:
- Businesses have constantly changing needs, and their territories and routes need to adapt quickly to keep up.
- Territory planning and route planning need to be fully integrated with one another.
- Time is money, and speeding up territory planning does more than save on labor costs, it can have a transformational impact on operational efficiency across your network.
Why do we think these pillars are so crucial? In part because the default state of a territory plan is that it’s losing efficiency. If you’ve gotten it right to begin with, then every change that occurs in your network, your customer mix, or your business more broadly takes you further away from the optimal conditions for your plan. Every week your delivery and service runs become less efficient, and it costs more to administer your network.
When you’re in a position to update your territories quickly, the paradigm shifts immediately. You aren’t stuck rolling out outdated territories and routes week after week. Instead, as soon as there’s a change in your network, you can update your plans and roll out new routes to ensure continuing efficiency.
Speeding up a weeks-long territory planning process by a few percentage points can help boost efficiency, but speeding it up to only a few days can be transformative.
How DispatchTrack Optimizes Territory Plans and Routes Within a Unified Platform
Again, one of the trickiest parts of getting the territory planning equation right is translating your territories into actual routes. Route optimization can be difficult enough as it is, and means that there’s very little visibility in most cases into how feasible a given territory may be. That means for every proposed territory you’re stuck laboriously plotting out potential routes for each seller or service technician across the week or month, accounting for all of the many and manifold factors that make routing complicated.
DispatchTrack’s platform does this all in a matter of minutes, and it does it automatically at the territory creation stage. We’re able to make this happen because we’ve built a powerful route optimization engine over the years, and it’s at the heart of our entire platform.
DispatchTrack users are able to start with a baseline territory plan and optimize it for increased efficiency in just a few clicks. The system automatically generates hypothetical routes at the territory planning stage, so you’re guaranteed to get territories that work
This is how our uniform and linen distribution client was able to speed up their territory planning so significantly.
We enabled them to:
- Input the parameters for their chosen distribution center
- Immediately visualize their baseline plan, including the hours and revenue for each driver/seller
- Run instantaneous optimizations on those baseline plans to improve balance and efficiency within each territory
- Quickly and easily adjust system-generated territories as needed
- Automatically generate daily routes during territory planning
- Run reports to highlight the changes between existing and proposed plans
This was a night and day difference compared to their previous way of doing things. It meant that they could turn territory planning and optimization from a huge headache to a potential source of profits.
A Clear Path to ROI
All of this leads us to arguably the most important question: how does delivery territory management with DispatchTrack lead to demonstrable cost savings for delivery and service businesses?
For our uniform and linen distributor, the most eye-popping figure was a 15% reduction in miles driven across their network. That’s not just a one-time optimization that saves money (in the form of fuel costs and driver hours) in the short-term—it’s a program of ongoing optimization that keeps them running lean even when their network changes.
This helps reduce delivery and service costs outright, while simultaneously improving the level of service being offered to customers. All of this is on top of the significant reductions in labor required from your territory planning teams.
These efficiency improvements aren’t just a matter of cost reduction, either. They represent an efficient way to make sure that field teams are getting an equal amount of work and are being given territories that they can actually manage successfully. This takes pressure off of both field and office teams, while making your entire operation more responsive to changing conditions. When you need to scale, you can make it happen seamlessly.
Because our solution powers territory planning simultaneously with routing—as well as the rest of the delivery and service journey, from customer engagement to tracking to chain of custody—in a single platform, our clients are able to optimize their networks to ensure equal workloads and revenue opportunities while and making sure their customers are being served efficiently across the board.
Reach Out Today to Turn Territory Planning into a Profit Center
Our clients who have to manage territories for sales and service see huge improvements in efficiency across their networks. Not only are we able to help them create more balanced territories in a fraction of the time, we can also empower them to stay agile as their needs change and their networks grow. It turns delivery and sales territory management into a sustainable driver of growth and profitability.
If that sounds good in theory, but wondering how it actually looks in practice, reach out to our team today. We’d love to show off the ways that DispatchTrack delivery territory management can save you time and money.